Compare Prices on Grand Princess Hawaii Cruises

A Great Cruise with Princess

Sail Date:
January 2014

Destination:
Hawaii

Embarkation:
San Francisco

I had an amazing time on my cruise with Princess. I would definitely recommend this cruise to other people but for me it did seem like a long time to be on a cruise for. The cruise was 15 days long, which at first seems like a good amount of time but it actually seemed very long. There are a lot of at sea days and after a while they do get kind of old.

First let me say I went on this cruise with my family, I'm a 20 year old college student. The age range for this cruise was mainly elderly people with very few young people but that didn't bother me much. I still enjoyed the time that I had. But because of the older ages the club on board would not get crowded and basically anything after 10 was dead. Not a lot of night life. Also the hot tub would close around 11 or 11:30 so you could do late night swimming but only in the pools.

We disembarked late from San Francisco because of a crash from the bus to a truck right outside the port. Crew had a hard time getting back More
to the ship, luckily I was already in line and not driving when that happened. It is crazy getting to the port because the Embarcadero is such a busy street and it's hard to find parking. My family and I took a limo which made it easy for us because we didn't have to worry about any of that and since it was three girls and my dad we had plenty of luggage. Getting on the ship was easy after checking in and getting our cruise cards. We quickly located our room and it was so clean and was a good size. We had an indoor cabin and it was in the middle of the ship, very good because you couldn't feel the ship move as much. We disembarked at 6 instead of 4 which was okay. It was nice sailing out to all the city lights and it was a clear night. We went under the bridge which was spectacular. The welcome aboard party was fun but chilly.

Everything was going good, until the 3rd night. This was the first formal which was a lot of fun and took a ton of good pictures. At 1 am the captain came on the speaker and said that we were dealing with a man overboard situation with a crew member and that we were turning around to try to find him. He never explained the process or how long we were going to look. The next day he gave updates every few hours. We never found the crew member and we searched for 36 hours. A lot of passengers were frustrated with it and because of the search we missed our first port in Hilo, Hawaii. We also arrived late to Oahu. I had never been more excited to see land after being on a ship for 6 days. It was nice being able to relax but there never seemed good activities to do if you were younger and not interesting in trivia everyday. The crew was amazing and work so hard. I didn't enjoy either of the cruise directors, they both tried to out do the other. Sammi, the main cruise director talked way too much and seemed fake. I went to a show every night, sometimes 2 shows and they were amazing. My favorite was the dancers and singers. I definitely recommend those shows, they were a lot of fun. The comedians were really good but some of their jokes were very similar and more targeted towards and older audience.

After finally getting to port those days were busy, fun and enjoyable. But we only had 3 days in Hawaii, would have liked more but then got back on the ship and had another 4 at sea days. Sometimes my friends and I had to scramble to find things to do but we all enjoyed each other's company. When there were 4 days left I came back to my room to find the smoke detector was leaking water, immediately someone came to our room and told us that we would have to move. I had unpacked everything so I had to repack and they helped us to our new room. Because of this they said they could move us again to a room with an obstructed view, meaning we would have a life boat or something in the way. I said no and they offered us a dinner at the crown grill. We took them up on that and it was very delicious.

The food on the ship was excellent. They had good choices to choose from. We did traditional dining and I enjoyed that. We had really good waiters who were very on top of it. I recommend ordering a lot at dinner because the portion sizes are very small. But I enjoyed all the food on the ship, the buffet did get old after a while.

On the day of disembarkation it was an easy process. Since my family didn't have passports we had to show our birth certificates and the line was extremely long for that so get there early. But other than that it was easy getting off and finding our luggage was easy. Now I'm sad that it's over and look forward to going on another cruise eventually! Less